To understand the role of fire in a naturally not fire prone region and its importance in the light of past and future climate change, multiple classical and new proxy approaches are used at different spatio-temporal scales. Sedimentary charcoal records from northern Germany to the Baltic countries will be evaluated to disentangle natural (climate, fuel) from human fire relationships throughout the Holocene. New fire proxies such as the molecular markers levoglucosan and its isomers will be tested to get deeper insight into past fire regimes of the most recent centuries using varved lake sediments of northern Poland and northeastern Germany.
